Chapter 9
Panic rose.
She tried again, forcing her boot against a notch. Sensation returned in a bolt so savage she nearly vomited.
“Yes,” she gasped.
“You’re lying.”
“That has never stopped you from believing convenient things before.”
Silence.
Then Calvin said, very quietly, “Give me your hand.”
She looked up.
He had stretched himself across the crumbling edge, one arm reaching down.
It was exactly as she had been less than an hour ago.
The reversal seemed to unsettle him as much as it did her.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
Henrietta reached.
Their gloves met.
He caught her wrist.
Pain showed in every line of his face as he dragged her upward using only his arms and one good leg. Henrietta kicked against the slope, found a foothold, lost it, found another.
The edge scraped beneath her ribs.
Then she was over.
For several seconds they lay side by side in the snow.
Neither moved.
Calvin’s hand still circled her wrist.
Henrietta turned her face toward him. “You may release me now.”
He did not.
His eyes remained fixed on the white sky.
“Calvin?”
Slowly, his hand loosened.
“Sorry.”
She sat up.
The world tilted.
Her vision blackened around the edges, then steadied.
The pine root stood another ten yards upslope, but the land above it offered little shelter. The storm had worsened. Evening was beginning to thicken the clouds, turning the blowing snow blue-gray.
The ranch might as well have been a hundred miles away.
Calvin followed her gaze. “We won’t make it.”
“We cannot stay here.”
“There’s cover below the ridge.”
Henrietta squinted through the snow. “Where?”
He pointed west. “Rock shelf. I saw it before I fell. Maybe fifty yards.”
Fifty yards.
It sounded laughable.
It sounded impossible.
It was also the only choice.
Henrietta helped him sit. “Then we go there.”
Calvin shook his head. “You go there.”
“Oh, not this again.”
“Listen to me.”
“I have listened to you for two months.”
His voice sharpened. “And I am telling you your knee is failing.”
“My knee has failed before.”
“In Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“Inside a house?”
She said nothing.
“That’s what I thought.”
Henrietta began coiling the rope.
Calvin grabbed it. “Damn it, woman.”
“Stop calling me woman as though you have forgotten my name.”
“Henrietta.”
The way he said it stopped her.
Not impatiently.
Not because she had demanded it.
His face had lost the rigid certainty she knew so well.